FINANCIAL TIMES
May 2, 2006

LPO/Masur

David Murray

Though there is plenty of 20th-century music in Kurt Masur's repertoire, this Silesian-born conductor – now 77, and music director of the Orchestre National de France as well as the LPO's principal conductor – is admired above all in Beethoven and his Romantic successors. A wider public came to know Masur for his role in the peaceful demonstrations that led to the unification of East and West Germany, while he was Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. With the LPO on Friday (and again on Saturday), he concentrated on Schumann, who died 150 years ago this year.

On the concert platform, Masur's tall, craggy figure dwarfed his soloist for the Cello Concerto, the Russian-born Natalia Gutman. He is the picture of benevolent authority: his platform persona is gracious, his gestures are few but decisive. He was particularly gracious with Gutman, a tried-and-true veteran of her instrument; this concerto is warmly lyrical throughout, and dominated by the solo instrument, which she knows how to make sing. She is spending most of this year playing this work and the First Concerto of Shostakovich around the world.

The most striking work in the Masur/LPO programme was their starter, Schumann's excellent overture to his failed opera Genoveva (which, if memory serves, is less dramatic and more wearisomely lyrical than you would guess from the overture). As is Masur's way, he made the lyrical passages intense, the dramatic opening and subsequent irruptions grandly telling. That was pretty much the only drama of the evening, for the Concerto and the Second Symphony are rather gentle affairs. The former is pleasantly lyrical to the near-exclusion of any other feeling – I suspect Schumann had not recognised the cello's potential for strong drama, but Gutman addressed it with glowing warmth.

The Second Symphony is arguably Schumann's least interesting one, despite its bright Scherzo and lovely Adagio. The First has a young man's infectious bravado, the Third (the "Rhenish") any amount of picturesque charm, the final Fourth (much revised) all the mature composer's gift for developing themes and enlivening contrasted moods; the Second mostly just sings. Masur ensured that it did that, along with its brightly ingenious Scherzo and fleet finale, but the final impression left by the whole concert was that Schumann had found his great lyrical gifts, and contrapuntal ingenuity, hard to marry to Beethovenian symphonic demands. Some would say, of course, that he was just inventing a different kind of "symphony".